[Shotwell] Shotwell 0.13 to drop JPEG support

[Eric Gregory]

[SAN FRANCISCO] Yorba announced today that Shotwell, their flagship photo
organizer software, will become a lossless-only photo manager with the
upcoming release of version 0.13.

Lossless-only means support for legacy image formats such as JPEG will be
dropped, a forward-looking move Yorba founder Adam Dingle praised as
“position[ing] Shotwell a generation ahead of competing photo management
solutions.”

Upon installation, Shotwell 0.13 will upconvert the user’s existing JPEG
image files to the lossless DNG format.

Users requiring additional space for their upconverted photos will be
directed to a site where they may purchase a new hard drive.  A percentage
of proceeds from these purchases will fund Shotwell development.

Yorba is confident it’s a positive step for photo management.

“Think of it this way,” said Shotwell lead developer Lucas Beeler, “If I
bought a four terabyte hard drive but only used two terabytes, I’d be
wasting half the drive.  Free space equals wasted money, which means
Shotwell 0.13 users will get more out of their computers than they did with
Shotwell 0.12.”

As Yorba’s Jim Nelson wrote on a blog post, “As a Gnome application, our
goal is simplicity. Dropping support for legacy formats such as JPEG is one
step toward that goal.”